[CTRL] [2] Death Beat

[Kris Millegan]

 -Caveat Lector-

an excerpt from;
Death Beat
Maria Jimena Duzan©1994
Peter Eisner, translator
HarperCollins
ISBN 0-06-017057-3
282 pps. – first/only edition – out-of-print
--[2]--
8
AN INFORMANT AND HIS SECRETS

Viafara's sudden appearance was not the first time that El Espectador had
received this kind of visit. Although Viafara was by far the highest-level
and most knowledgeable person to approach us, many people came to the
newspaper claiming to have exclusive, ground-breaking information.

As early as 1987, El Espectador and Semana, as well as several television
news outlets, were publishing stories based on sources who spoke of an
alliance between the private militias and the cocaine bosses; these reports
flew in the face of an opposite claim that the drug bosses were in league
with the leftist guerrillas. That was the line propagated by the Colombian
military and spurred on by the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Lewis A. Tambs.
On television, in weekly magazines, and in newspapers, there were occasional
reports of a supposed split between Rodriguez Gacha and FARC, which had been
protecting his coca fields and laboratories. The stories were systematically
denied by both the army and the militia groups themselves, who insisted on
referring to themselves as self-defense patrols.

At El Espectador I had written several reports about what was going on in
Magdalena Medio. Toward the end of 1988, several peasants from Magdalena
Medio, terrorized by the violence, came Gacha abreast of the government's
antinarcotics operations, quickly delivering secret briefings to him.

In an interview with one of them, we told a dramatic tale of a man whose
brother had been killed by the death squads. When the surviving brother
decided to place the case before a judge, the militias responded by
kidnapping his mother. Since then, the man could not go back to Puerto
Boyaca. "When I realized that justice had no meaning, even though we could
prove who had killed my brother-it was a sicario who was a member of the
Puerto Boyaca death squads—I decided to come to see you to get the story
out," the man said. "They are killing the peasants where I live. If you want
to go there, we should hang a sign around our necks with our names on it.
That way the militia will be able to check us out when we come to a
roadblock, to see if we're on the list of suspected 'sympathizers with the
guerrillas.' But we probably should put something else on the sign, something
like 'I'm not a Communist."'

I went to Magdalena Medio. The peasants showed me the roadblocks and the
militias manning them; the tacit support of the army was obvious. Our report
hit the streets of Bogota but didn't make it far in Puerto Boyaca. The
militias retaliated by blocking the distribution of El Espectador, seizing
deliveries of the newspaper at the local distributor in Magdalena Medio. Not
all newspapers received the same treatment, however. El Tiempo, whose
correspondent in Magdalena Medio was Pablo Guarin, a founding member of the
rightist militias, published a paid advertisement in July 1988 in which the
squads answered the charges in an open letter addressed to me.

The self-defense groups not only rejected any connection with the cocaine
bosses-they continue to reject the link to this daybut took credit for
improving the lot of the people living in Magdalena Medio.

"We invite the journalist Duzan to see with her own eyes the schools and the
new streets that have been paved in Puerto Boyaca, and to see further that
they are certainly not used any longer by international communism."

The letter was signed by the mayor of Puerto Boyaca, Luis Alfredo Rubio
Rojas. A year later, a judge would issue an arrest warrant against Rubio
Rojas, implicating him in one of the ongoing series of massacres of peasants.
Although Rubio Rojas was arrested, he was-set free in 1989 in a raid staged
by his comrades. Tioday, he is a fugitive from justice.

By 1989 the militias had managed to obtain a certain political currency in
the nation, especially in the zones where they had beaten back the guerrilla
groups. In 1988 the guerrillas had been forced to retreat, not in battles
with the regular army but with these drug-financed militias. The
"pacification" campaign conducted in Magdalena Medio had also been conducted
in other parts of the country, leading the militia squads to declare they
were winning the war on subversion. The steady stream of assassinations of
members of the Patriotic Union succeeded in sinking the leftist political
experiment. This was evident in popular mayoral elections in 1988, when the
Patriotic Union saw an ebbing of its support, more like a full-fledged sea
change, while the Liberal party began to retake positions it lost to its
leftist rivals in 1986.

Landowners were able to return to their lands, and the areas that had
suffered a strong economic depression were receiving an influx of drug money
that brought a certain newfound prosperity. The drug bosses and their
militias were so self-assured and so entrenched that by 1989 they were able
to field their own political party, which they called MORENA (the color brown
in Spanish and, in this case, an acronym for the Movimiento Revolucionario
Nacional—National Revolutionary Movement). Their goals were to obtain legal
status to field presidential candidates in the next election and to obtain
equal treatment with the leftist guerrillas. "We are a rightist guerrilla
movement. While the leftist guerrillas seek to overthrow the established
order, we fight to preserve the national institutions," declared a spokesman
for the group in an interview. MORENA was, to be sure, a right-wing movement,
but a majority of its members were in the Liberal party whose regional
leaders had become major landowners with a vested interest in the ideals of
the cattlemen's association.

The army said nothing. In numerous interviews, no battalion commanders I
spoke with ever admitted knowing about the rightwing drug armies. Every time
a massacre occurred or a leftist leader was assassinated, the army contended
that the violence was the work of the Communists.

Although the army commanders denied any connection with the militias and the
drug lords, there was growing sentiment that such a link existed. Despite the
fact that the drug bosses were operating in the same region as the militias
and everyone knew where the militias were located, there never was a
confirmed report of fighting between the militias and the army. The scant
 investigations that had been conducted following peasant massacres, which
were carried out in spite of tremendous pressure on and death threats to
judges who were hearing the cases, acknowledged that not only were some
members of the army and police involved in massacres, but that the whole
death apparatus came from Magdalena Medio.

Members of the Colombian government, or at least the key aides of President
Virgilio Barco, were plainly aware of the alliance between the drug bosses
and the militias, but their open acknowledgment of it was gradual, even
though evidence was available as early as 1985. After the death of Jaime
Pardo Leal in October 1987, certain voices in the government began to
incorporate the subject of the militia groups into the public debate
specially after Hernando Corral produced a television report with footage of
armysupplied militiamen fighting FARC. One of the people who began to speak
up about the militias was Cesar Gaviria, Barco's minister of the interior. In
a heated speech in Congress, Gaviria declared the existence of 122
paramilitary organizations.

It was only after the assassination of twelve judges in early 1989 that the
government established a new branch of the national police, the Elite Corps.
The Elite Corps was to be a specially trained counterinsurgency unit whose
objective would be to dismantle the drug militias. Yet none of these
activities had much of an effect on the national consciousness. It was
Viafara who made the difference.

Fernando Cano decided we needed to break the story fast. There were ways to
publish important details of Viafara's report without destroying the security
of the ongoing police operations. Once the government had shepherded Viafara
out of the country to the United States, we went ahead. On April 6, 1989,
about six weeks after the meeting with Viafara, we published a story under
the simple headline VIA AN INFORMANT. The article disclosed that foreign
mercenaries were training the drug bosses and their subordinates in the use
of explosives, armed warfare, and terror. It also stated that the drug
militias had an entire arsenal at their disposal—M-16s, AK-47s, Galil 762s,
MP-5s, and grenades—supplied directly by the corrupt Barbula Battalion, under
the command of Colonel Luis Bohorquez.

There were photographs, too, showing Bohorquez along with some of the
mercenaries, Henry Perez, and many others. One such photograph was published
in our second report.

The reaction was immediate. Bohorquez went before the television cameras
minutes before the defense ministry was to announce he had been relieved of
his duties. Choking away tears, he announced his retirement. "I love this
uniform. And I regret to say that I will not permit it to be stained or
stepped upon.... I am a soldier to the depths of my being. I am radically
opposed to subversion. . . . And if that brings my dismissal . . . so be it."
Despite the emotion, his words had a menacing quality, as if he were
threatening that his downfall would not go unavenged.

Attempts to deny that mercenaries were training a drug army tried to
repudiate Viafara's testimony. They accused him of being a small-time dope
dealer and said he had stolen medicine from the militias and decided to
desert for fear of being killed. But the government proved Viafara's
information correct, and by the end of April, Semana magazine published
details of a secret report by DAS, confirming the presence of mercenaries and
naming each of them.

The secret report revealed for the first time the name of Yair Klein, a
retired Israeli colonel who was the chief Israeli protagonist in the affair.
Klein was a white-haired, fifty-four-year-old former Israeli tank commander
with a robust, military bearing. Aside from being a colonel in the Israeli
army reserve, Klein was president of Spearhead Ltd., an Israeli firm that
provided military know-how and equipment to foreign clients; according to
Viafara, Klein's Israeli associates told him that Spearhead also trained the
U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contras in Honduras and the Christian Phalangists in
Lebanon.

Viafara first met Klein in Puerto Boyaca in 1987. Viafara's detailed
description of the visits by Klein and other Israelis included the hotels
where they stayed, the dates they were there, and the names of each person
involved. Klein moved about Magdalena Medio in the company of active members
of the military. He and his men, including Mike Tzedaka, Spearhead's chief
instructor, and Arik Afek, an Israeli citizen murdered mysteriously in 1990
in the United States, were presented as trainers who were to conduct personal
security courses. Klein did not speak Spanish and communicated with his hosts
by means of his translator, Teddy Melnyk.

It was not only the political situation that made the security business
increasingly lucrative in Colombia. The Colombian armed forces and several
Israeli armaments companies already enjoyed well-established relationships.
Under Colombian law, the armed forces had budgetary independence; they were
able to buy weapons as they saw fit without oversight from Congress or the
executive branch. (Under the government of Cesar Gaviria, which took office
in 1990, there is now civilian oversight of the defense department.)

>From 1986 to 1989, General Rafael Samudio Molina, the Colombian minister of
defense, bought sixteen Kfir fighter planes from Israel and greatly increased
arms purchases. When I asked an Israeli embassy official what he thought
Colombia needed with Kfir jets, he said, "That's their problem. Our job is to
sell." Before Samudio was appointed, the United States had been the largest
defense supplier to Colombia. Afterward, the armed forces and Israel had
signed accords for training security organizations in Colombia, especially
the escort contingent that protected highranking members of the Barco
government.

The bodyguard assigned to me was proud to say that he was Israeli-trained.
"You see a difference in the training between the gringos and the Israelis,"
he told me. "When you're under attack, the Americans teach you to try to
avoid hurting innocent bystanders. For the Israelis the objective is the only
thing that matters. They teach you to be ready to shoot at anything that
moves."

According to the DAS document, Klein's instructions came through two Israelis
already on the scene—Maerot Shoshani and Eitan Koren-who enjoyed excellent
relations with General Samudio. Shoshani was the representative of the Klal
group, an Israeli company that was selling arms to the Colombian government.
Klein and Shoshani had met some time back, when Klein was president of
Israeli Military Industry, IMI, the official armaments manufacturer for the
state of Israel.

Klein proposed training sessions for the Colombian security police, DAS, as
well as for the antinarcotics police, the air force, and the army. He also
met with representatives of UNIBAN, a banana-growers cooperative that was
being threatened by leftist guerrillas. But Klein came up empty-handed.

His luck was soon to change. In October 1987 Shoshani introduced Klein to the
leaders of the Colombian Cattlemen's Association of Magdalena Medio. They had
work for him.

A meeting was arranged with Perez, by now functioning as Rodriguez Gacha's
military chief. Luis Alberto Meneses, a cashiered army captain, was also
there, as were other directors of the cattlemen's association. Meneses's job
in the drug organization was to pay the necessary bribes to keep military and
police officials in line. Klein would consistently deny knowing about any
connection between Perez and Meneses and the drug rings, insisting that the
cattleman's association represented "defenseless peasants who sought to free
themselves from the guerrilla yoke."

Also at the meeting were two Colombian army generals who the Israelis said
never identified themselves. The generals told Mein that they supported the
work of the cattlemen's association in their fight against the guerrillas.

In November 1987 a second meeting was held in Puerto Boyaca, attended by
Klein and Arik Afek to negotiate a price tag for the training courses that
were to be offered. Perez and Meneses once again represented the cattlemen's
association at that meeting. Klein sought $300,000 to conduct the courses,
but eventually settled for $76,000.

In the six months in which the Israelis trained the militias in Magdalena
Medio, the country began to experience previously unknown levels of violence:
massacres of unarmed civilians and peasants shot at point-blank range, all
killed by the militia squads that Klein and his associates were training. (In
all, about eighty massacres of about fifteen hundred people took place in
Colombia from January 1988 to January 1989.)

The first such recorded massacre was on Honduras and La Negra, two ranches in
Uraba, in northwestern Colombia, in March 1988. A commando squadron from the
militias rounded up forty peasant squatters who were living on ranch land
owned by the drug bosses and murdered them.

The second massacre took place on April 11, 1988, at the fishing village of
Punta Coquitos in the northern province of Uraba. The third massacre occurred
in La Mejor Esquina, in Cordoba, in northern Colombia where seventy
well-armed masked men entered the village during a fandango—a folksy fiesta.
The commando leader took out a list and called out the names of peasants who
were promptly taken aside and executed for allegedly being guerrilla
collaborators.

The massacres were conducted with similar methods and identical weapons. In
all the cases, DAS said, there was evidence that linked the crimes to
military intelligence officers.

But the most important detail gleaned from investigations and interrogations
of those captured was that all the attackers were trained in Puerto Boyaca by
foreign mercenaries. The DAS report concluded that "to judge the assault
techniques used during the massacres at Uraba and Cordoba—the discipline, the
use of insignias and uniforms, patrol techniques, the type of arms, and
method of using them, the communications equipment and the personal security
and identification measures-one can say that this new method of violence
appears to be connected in some way to foreign training."

In early 1989, even after El Espectador had published the first expose based
on Viafara's testimony, the drug bosses were confident that Viafara's
testimony would not have an impact. Perez and Rodriguez Gacha again sought
out Klein, asking him to conduct yet another training session. The fourth
Israeli training course began on March 24, 1989, with fifteen students from
Pacho, Medellin, and Puerto Boyaca. The coordinator of the drug militias was
Oscar Echandia Sanchez, a retired army colonel, who linked up with the
cocaine bosses and their militias after having served as military mayor of
Puerto Boyaca. Only four of twentytwo students were given passing grades at
the end of the threeweek session. Those who did not pass were allowed to go
home; many returned to their gangs. The course was financed by Pablo Escobar,
Rodriguez Gacha, Perez, and Ramiro Guzman, known as "Don Ramiro."

Since Viafara had deserted some time earlier, the tracks of the arms
shipments might not have been uncovered. Indeed, there might have been no one
to prove Klein had returned for the fourth training course. But Klein did not
know that there was another deserter from the militia ranks. This time it was
a more important figure, better situated in the criminal enterprise than
Viafara: Oscar Echandia Sanchez himself.

Like Viafara, Echandia Sanchez had decided to come in from the cold and
become an informant for the government. He had entered the militias because
he thought it necessary to stop the guerrillas, but what he was living
through had nothing to do with the idealistic preachings of anti-Communism
and protection of homeland. He soon decided that the time was right for him
to help the police. As course coordinator, he had access to a video training
tape prepared by Klein. He absconded with a copy and brought it to the Bogota
offices of the national television network.

In June 1989 the video was broadcast throughout the country.

The reaction was swift. The presence of the trainers was greeted with shock
and disbelief. DAS later used the tape to develop key parts of its investigati
on. For example, it discovered that one of the students Klein was training,
with the code name Vladimir, was the same man who had been identified by
survivors of several different peasant massacres as a leader of the
commando-executioners. Vladimir was also identified by the survivor of the
massacre of the judges on January 18, 1989.

Klein, who produced the tape as a business-promotion device, never considered
that it might ever be broadcast. The tape showed that the students were at
the command of the drug militias and that they were responsible for the
majority of the massacres that were committed in 1988. It proved that the
victims were not guerrillas. The killers had brutally murdered innocent
peasants and twelve federal magistrates.

Klein and Arik Afek also appeared in the video, and their presence brought a
swift indictment and arrest warrants against them. The warrant against Klein
is still outstanding; he escaped arrest in Colombia, went to Antigua for a
time, and then returned to Israel. Klein's student Vladimir was captured on
August 1, 1989, in Medellin by the metropolitan police chief, Colonel
Waldemar Franklin Quintero, who was the victim of a brutal assassination on
August 16; Vladimir is still in prison.

Arik Afek, who also escaped arrest at that time, was found murdered in the
trunk of his car at Miami International Airport on January 24, 1990. His
killers have never been found. Afek's final visit to Colombia was in August
1989. In a clandestine interview with an Israeli reporter during that trip,
Afek said that he was being followed.

"By whom?" the Israeli reporter asked.

"I think it's Mossad," Afek replied.

Echandia Sanchez's testimony confirmed Viafara's deposition but accomplished
much more. It revealed the existence of an international conspiracy that
linked Israelis to a web of monetary transactions through banks in the United
States, Panama, and Israel; to corrupt government officials on the Caribbean
island of Antigua; and to retired Colombian army officers linked with the drug
 cartels. All were working on a project much more ambitious than the
government investigators had realized, one that sounded like it was right out
of a James Bond novel: the creation of a survival school on Antigua, in which
Klein would be a partner with the Antiguan government.

More than just a training center for the drug militias, who Klein still
considered defenseless peasants, this would be a center for "freedom
fighters" from around the world. The training site would also be the focal
point for illegal Israeli arms. Klein would obtain the weapons from Israel
and supply them to participants in the training courses on Antigua. When the
"graduates" returned home, they would take their new weapons with them. Klein
asked Echandia Sanchez to be an instructor at the Antigua school.

Klein was facing a number of problems in Magdalena Medio. There were
shortages of technical materials, arms, and explosives and no ammunition. In
addition, news reports-especially in El Espectador—and pronouncements by
General Maza Marquez confirming Viafara's deposition on the presence of
foreign mercenaries had made Magdalena Medio a site that was hardly ideal for
Klein's operations.

On the other hand, Antigua had great advantages. The Israelis had excellent
relations with the Caribbean nation via their local contact, Maurice Sarfati,
an Israeli who had been doing business on the island since 1983. Sarfati was
close to John Vere Bird, Jr., son of the island's longtime prime minister,
member of Parliament, and a power broker in the Antiguan cabinet. He also had
contact with Clyde Walker, the commander of the Antiguan police. The idea of
a training center was also broached in Miami on October 5, 1988, at a meeting
attended by Klein, Sarfati, and Walker.

Just when everything seemed to be going well for Klein, the Antiguan
government, motivated by Colombian press reports and by investigations of
Klein's illegal activities in Colombia, suddenly decided to reject the
proposal on April 10, 1989.

On March 28, 1989, the Danish flagship Else Thuesen set sail from the Israeli
port of Haifa with a cargo of arms legally consigned by IMI, the Israeli
state armaments company, bound for Chile, Ecuador, Colombia, and Antigua. On
April 22, the ship docked at St. Johns, Antigua, as planned, after an
apparently uneventful Atlantic voyage. One container, containing 400 Galil
rifles, 100 Uzis, and $323,205 in ammunition, which was destined for the
Antiguan defense forces, was unloaded.

Two days after the Else Thuesen docked at St. Johns, another ship, the
Panamanian flagship Seapoint, arrived. The Seapoint attracted no particular
attention either, even though it was on a U.S. tracking list of vessels that
could be carrying drugs. The rest of the cargo from the Else Thuesen was unloa
ded and hoisted aboard the Seapoint, and both ships set sail once more.

The entire operation was revealed about six months later, after the death of
Rodriguez Gacha on December 15, 1989, when 232 Galils from this same shipment
were found by Colombian police in hidden stashes on property belonging to the
Mexican. The Colombian government asked the Israeli government for an
explanation. The answer was a bombshell: The serial numbers of the weapons
seized on Rodriguez Gacha's land corresponded to the weapons that left Haifa
en route to Antigua.

A U.S. Senate investigation showed that Klein's company, Spearhead, issued
close to $400,000 in payments for the arms to IMI, controlled by the Israeli
government. Klein denied any connection to the case and rejected reports that
the arms were paid for by Rodriguez Gacha's paramilitary forces, which he had
trained. Klein said that the arms transaction had been between Maurice
Sarfati and the government of Antigua.

Two of my colleagues, Ignacio Gomez of El Espectador and Peter Eisner of Newsd
ay, then reported the real dimensions of the story. Eisner had decided to
return to the field as Newsday's Latin America correspondent after a
four-year stint as foreign editor for the New York newspaper. With all the
violence in Colombia in 1989, Peter, like many other reporters, came to the
country in the midst of bombs exploding by remote control in the streets of
poor and wealthy neighborhoods alike.

As the guns were being discovered, Ignacio Gomez, another able investigative
reporter, faithfully recorded the serial number of each one in his pocket
computer. He did the same thing with each serial number of the weapons found
with the suspects in the assassination of Luis Carlos Galan, the Liberal
party's presidential candidate. In June 1990, on one of his frequent trips to
Colombia, Peter showed up at Ignacio's door with a present—a secret document
Peter had obtained that was the packing list of the arms sent from Israel to
Antigua.

Ignacio pulled out his own list, and the two excitedly began comparing notes.
They read each serial number from their respective lists until something
jumped to their attention: One of the guns on Peter's list of weapons sent to
Antigua was also on Igna
 cio's list of weapons held by Rodriguez Gacha. And that weapon was later
traced to the house of the suspects in the murder of Luis Carlos Galan.

Israel said that its only information about Klein's illegal activities came
via news stories and reports from the Israeli embassy in Bogota in April
1989. However, Israeli officials did know that Klein had been working
illegally in Colombia for three years; the Israeli embassy acted only after
Klein's illegal activities were made public.

Klein returned to live in Tel Aviv, where he was found guilty by an Israeli
court of having provided military training and knowhow in Colombia and
Antigua without permission. He was sentenced on January 3, 199 1, to a
suspended one-year jail term with three years' probation. He also was fined
$40,000, and his company was fined $35,000. He appealed the conviction.

Maurice Sarfati, who served as an intermediary in Antigua for the arms
shipments, was living scot-free in Paris. It was Sarfati who falsified
end-user certificates presented by Israel as proof that the weapons sale to
Antigua was legal.

An official DAS investigation said that the arms trafficking via Antigua "was
carried out with the knowledge of Israeli government officials," noting that
the entire shipment had the approval of IMI as it left Haifa. Israel rejected
any suggestion of official involvement; faced with an official Colombian
protest, it blamed the government of Antigua. Antigua in turn conducted its
own investigation, finding itself innocent of all responsibility in the case.
John Vere Bird, Jr., however, was stripped of his cabinet post as minister of
public works.

Following its investigation, the Israeli government declared that Spearhead
employees had no connection with the Colombian drug cartels. Testimony by
Viafara and Oscar Echandia Sanchez revealed not only that the cattlemen's
association was financed by Rodriguez Gacha, but that Klein and his
colleagues met face to face with the Mexican and with his son Fredy, who was
one of the students shown in the training video made by the Israeli
mercenaries.

The Seapoint, the ship that carried the arms from Antigua to Panama, was
seized by Mexican authorities in August 1989 with a cargo of two and a half
tons of cocaine.

Echandia Sanchez continued to provide information to DAS until May 1990, when
the Antigua arms affair came to light and it became obvious that he was a
principal informant for the government. Since then he has lived underground
with DAS protection. Meneses, who served as an intermediary between the
cattlemen's association and Klein, was arrested in 1990 but later released.
It is believed that he returned to Magdalena Medio to work with the drug
militias.

Backed by Viafara's revelations about the drug militias, DAS and the
Colombian Elite Corps mounted a special mission in Magdalena Medio,
code-named Operation Springtime. The mission began on April 4, 1989, when
Klein's course on explosives had been going on for twelve days in Puerto
Boyaca.

Once again, as on so many other occasions, news of the operation had already
filtered through to the drug dealers. Despite all the secrecy, all the
precautions, the government was finding it impossible to hide anything from
the cartel. Just before the police commandos came in, the drug militias
pulled up stakes along with the two Israeli instructors, Mike Tzedaka and a
man identified only as Amancia, and moved to a more secure location. The drug
sweep failed to find the kingpins, or even middle-level drug dealers, but it
did come up with a record seizure of pure cocaine: four teen metric tons.

Everywhere the police followed the tale mapped out by Viafara, they found
things set up exactly as he had described them. For the first time, they
seized the installations of the cattlemen's association while in search of a
computerized file that Viafara said would tell the intimate details of the
Medellin cartel's operations. However, when they got there, the files had
been conveniently erased. The agents contented themselves with important
material about Rodriguez Gacha and his finances.

When General Maza Marquez visited our newsroom to tell us the results of
Operation Springtime, I had the same thought as when Jaime Pardo Leal exposed
the assassinations of his Patriotic Union allies at the hands of the drug
Mafia.

"They're going to kill this man."

Maza Marquez was of medium height, a robust man who was tough and
impenetrable, yet jovial and warm. He had a piercing gaze; he focused
intently on the person he was talking to, always pausing in silence to
measure his reply. If an answer was to be tough, it came with a curt, coplike
answer from pursed lips. And if
 it was to be pleasing, a smile erupted, and his brilliant white teeth
illuminated the atmosphere around him. He was intense and engrossing, not an
easy man to figure out.

The general's accent marked him as coming from the north. He was born in
Cienaga, a coastal city that was the scene of one of the most tragic events
in Colombian history: the massacre in 1929 of four thousand striking banana
workers by the Colombian army that was under the command of a Colombian army
general acting on behalf of the United Fruit Company.

As a young man Maza Marquez always knew he would get into police work. He
wanted to be a detective. Maza Marquez went to school in Barranquilla, a
populous city on the Caribbean coast. Barranquilla was a principal cultural
center, and Maza Marquez soaked up the atmosphere. He was always an avid
reader and loved Cuban rhythms—guaguango and son. He was adept at entering
different social and cultural circles, equally at home among the politicians
and intellectuals of the Colombian coast. His friends ranged from army
officers to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who was also born in the Caribbean North
and is a distant relative. He had, perhaps, some of the traits of the ancient
indigenous peoples of the Caribbean region, the Arhuac Indians, who were
known for their aptitude in war and in politics.

Maza Marquez first became known in the 1970s as chief of investigations for
the national police. He received credit for negotiating the release of kidnap
victims when they had been seized by common criminals and guerrillas. I first
met him when my uncle, Antonio Saenz, was kidnapped for ransom by a group of
bandits in October 1979. In that instance, my uncle was able to escape his
captors. What impressed me was that Maza Marquez, then holding the rank of
colonel, was always personally on the scene and in charge. Unlike the average
officer, who has few dealings with the public, Maza Marquez was an instant
hit in the media. Reporters always had excellent relations with him, and he
was well publicized and highly regarded. There was criticism of his tough
tactics in extracting information from suspects, but such charges always were
muted by his ability to seize the headlines. Rich and poor were all freed by
Maza Marquez whose crime-fighting prowess was already winning him the
nickname of the Colombian Kojak in some journalistic circles.

Like all law enforcement officers, his years of service were marked by the
fight against the leftist guerrillas. He started out as a member of a
military whose fast-track officers were educated in U.S. army schools,
training that enhanced their anti-Communist stance. However, in recent years,
because of the growth of the drug-trafficking problem there was a division of
labor. The police, which Maza Marquez joined after a stint in the regular
army, concentrated on combating drug crimes; the army focused on leftist
subversion. In 1981 the national police created a special antinarcotics unit,
which had achieved results in fighting the drug rings. But the cost was
shattering; an investigation revealed that the 1986 assassination of Colonel
Jaime Ramirez, chief of the antinarcotics squad, was an inside job. Only
after Ramirez was gunned down did the scope of corruption within the police
become known.

As a result, the Barco government in 1989 created yet another new police
organism, the Elite Corps, intended to be a strike force whose goal was to
destroy drug terrorism and the militias controlled by the drug bosses. The
members of this new organization were well trained, well paid, and chosen for
their spotless records; their names were kept secret to protect their
identities. They were rotated in and out of the corps from other divisions in
an attempt to maintain operational security. Maza Marquez, as the nation's
chief of police investigations, provided the raw material for the Elite
Corps's operations. Following the peasant massacres of 1988, he was again
operating with a high profile. The Barco government, faced with heavy
international criticism for human rights abuses, had convened a meeting of
Colombia's National Security Council to deal with the massacres. The goal was
to promote and infuse energy into investigations so that major crimes could
be solved and stopped. Maza Marquez was the central figure in this redoubled
effort.

Most government officials generally saw journalists as potential agents of an
international Communist plot to discredit them and help the guerrillas. Only
the reporters who fawned and paid deference to them were able to coax real
information out of them. The officials professed to keep an informal list of
guerrilla sympathizers, and if there was such a list, I was on it. There was
not a great deal of logic to my being branded a guerrilla sympathizer; I had
nothing against the military as an institution, nor had I ever been a
Communist or a member of any guerrilla group.

But if I was suspect in their eyes, the feeling was mutual. The leadership of
the army was not willing to accept criticism; any dissension must be
Communist-inspired. If, for example, a battalion sought out guerrilla
sympathizers, there were likely to be innocent, unprovoked deaths. When
reporters wrote about these abuses of human rights, they landed in the same
category as the victims: guilty by suspicion.

But Maza Marquez went a long way toward restoring my faith in the armed
forces. When he was named chief of DAS and promoted to general, he quickly
sought out journalists who traditionally were critical of the government and
its security forces. He approached us with all the charm and wit at his
disposal, ready to disarm potential critics in lively, open debate. Above
all, we had a mutual interest in discovering the roots of the violence, the
culprits of the massacres. As we both investigated the militias, the
cattlemen's association, and the drug bosses, we were in close contact.
Quickly, we recognized that we were targets of the same enemy.

"I admire people like you because I am a professional trained to face death
and deal with that," he would often say. "But you are not trained; you are
willing to face death all the same."

His opinions and views on drug dealing diverged from the conventional wisdom.
He rejected the U.S.-promoted thesis that there was an alliance between the
guerrillas and the drug dealers, with some hidden link to Cuba certain to be
found. Rather, Maza Marquez believed the threat came from the private armies
funded with drug money and supported by the rightist landowners and drug
dealers in Magdalena Medio. In taking this view, he was attacked by longtime
associates in the military, more than one of whom began to call him a
Communist. In 1989, flyers were seen circulating in Magdalena Medio
discrediting Maza Marquez and his work, charging that he was fronting for the
guerrillas. This charge was as absurd in the Colombian context as saying that
J. Edgar Hoover belonged to the Weathermen.

Rodriguez Gacha, seeing his operations fouled up by Maza Marquez's diligence,
said in the interview before he was gunned down in September 1989 that Maza
Marquez was being paid off by the rival Cali cartel. Others mouthed the same
charge. Still others said that Maza Marquez's brother worked as the chief
accountant for the Cali cartel. Maza Marquez angrily denied such charges and
demanded that his accusers present evidence. None was ever forthcoming. Some
U.S. officials subscribed to those charges and made other claims as well. The
U.S. State Department prepared a dossier on him, in which it reported
allegations that a woman in DAS custody had been tortured under Maza
Marquez's command. Maza Marquez proved that the woman never existed and that
it had all be a ruse. Nevertheless, he took pains to be cordial with U.S.
officials, saying he wanted to maintain good relations, although he felt that
they were no substitute for Colombian police work in combating the drug
bosses. "We Colombians know more about fighting the drug war than the
gringos," he said. "They don't know the jungle, they don't know the
mountains, and they get frightened every time something happens. They shutter
their windows and go home. What is it we have to learn from them?"

It certainly seemed that Maza Marquez needed little training from anyone. He
had uncanny instincts and remarkable luckhaving escaped at least six
assassination attempts. "This kind of incredible luck comes from on high,
from the divine source, a holy source of which I am a devotee.... I start
feeling like one of the Untouchables."

The first attack on his life was staged by M-19, which put fifteen hundred
pounds of dynamite in a car on his route to work. But because there was a
traffic jam that day, Maza Marquez took another route, and the bomb, which
had a remote-control device, was not detonated. Next, the National Liberation
Army sent him a book bomb, which had a cover saying it was on the life of
Lenin. But someone noticed it had glue all over it and got suspicious. Two
agents took it outside and while trying to detonate it were severely injured.

The third attack would have gotten him, but he was saved by a lucky change to
a more heavily armored car.

On May 27, 1989, in the evening, I was at Colonel Luis Eder Espana Pena's
house, invited to a birthday party for him. Also there was General Octavio
Vargas Silva, chief of the Elite Corps, who in due course told me quietly
that one of our units had arrested a retired army captain named Huanumen and
an active member of the national police, Jose Joaquin Rivera. And this
captain was carrying papers that pointed toward an impending attack against
me. I told him that I was certainly interested in seeing the material. We
agreed to meet on the following morning at the home of the assistant police
director, General Arturo Casadiego. But first I went to the Military Club, to
the steambaths, as I usually do. While I was there a retired police colonel
came up to me and told me matter-of-factly: 'Listen General, be very careful
because I've heard several officers right here in the bath plotting against
you.' I was amazed. I finished the steam bath, got dressed, went home to pick
up my wife, and drove to General Casadiego's house as planned. Also there
were General Gomez Padilla, the police director, and General Fajardo Vanegas.
They showed me a portion of the papers where it was easy to see-and I can say
from experience-that they were dealing with an intelligence analysis prepared
for a man named Senor de las Flores. I knew that was a pseudonym for Pablo
Escobar—Medelin, his base, is always referred to as the city of flowers
[flores in Spanish]. The papers said, 'As far as Maza Marquez is concerned,
we have him nailed and are just awaiting your instructions-at the very least
we are going to really shake him up.' On reading the papers, I said, 'This is
clearly a plot to kill me.'

So we started talking about what to do. And I said the best thing to do was
to cut them off. On Tuesday, the thirtieth, two days later, I told them I
could issue a release letting them know that we were on to the plan.

Well, I can say that the news of the plot was immobilizing. I stayed about
one hour more with the other men, then said good night and went home with my
wife. From home, I called my intelligence chief and told him to meet me at
the office Monday morning, even though it was a holiday. I told him I had
something to talk to him about.

When we got to the office, I asked him to get in touch with this Captain
Huanumen to try to win him over and get us details about what they had in
mind. At the same time I got a call from the presidential chief of staff,
German Montoya, asking to come talk to me. He said it had to do with a family
matter. He stopped by with two of his daughters-in-law. In a very troubled
tone of voice, he told me that his son Gustavo had just been kidnapped. After
a while, I left the office and went down to the car pool. I had an old
Mercedes at that time. It was armored, but not in good working condition. In
fact, it broke down that afternoon at the front gate. So I switched cars.

The following day I got up quite early. It was strange that when I went
downstairs, they brought neither my Mercedes nor the car I had switched to,
but a third car, an armored vehicle that had been used by President Betancur.
It was fully armored and was quite heavy, so much so that they didn't use it
anymore. Nevertheless, that was the car I rode to work in that morning. When
we crossed Fifty-seventh Street on Seventh Avenue, I felt a sudden sharp thud
and then the sensation of being dragged under the waves in the ocean, and I
saw that a large number of projectiles were hitting the windows.

I shouted to the driver that we were being attacked, but it was a matter of
seconds, and the car was already stuck and on the sidewalk. Seconds more
passed, and I thought they were coming to kill me. But suddenly it all
stopped. I got out of the car, and the sight was infernal. I was shocked to
see that the bodies all over the outside of the car were my bodyguards, all
smeared in blood. People crying, mutilated, half a body torn apart, lying
there. Two of my bodyguards were severely wounded. One of them had his eye
torn out; the other I could see was wounded and growing weak but standing by
nevertheless. I hauled them both up and took them on my back to the military
hospital. Many people criticized me afterward for what I did. But that's easy
to say after the fact. At such a time of suffering, seeing these two boys so
badly hurt, and I was well ... I felt fine ... I just had to do something,
and I did it.

When we got to the hospital there was much confusion. Others who had been
wounded in the attack were also arriving. I was there perhaps for half an
hour until I was picked up by my men and taken back to the office. I started
to realize that all this had been one huge conspiracy... I sat down and wrote
what I knew about the event. I consider it a faithful reflection of what
Colombia has been going through.

He wrote his statement and then went out in front of the television cameras
to read it himself; he stood there with a stern, hard gaze, and in his
clipped, erudite language began to speak:

"I ask myself, Mr. Attorney General, if Colombians can believe that the drug
cartels and the 'self-defense' groups supported by them want to achieve some
sort of equilibrium for the stability of our democracy? Is it not in fact
their intention to use all of their wealth to pay graft and foster corruption
among government officials, in an attempt to control ... political and
economic power in this country? Let us take a look at what is happening....
Mr. Attorney General, investigate and you will find the answer that the
nation needs to hear. Send your most honorable men. . . ."

The assassination attempt, he said, "has one positive result and that is that
for the first time we no longer have to guess. . . ."

 Maza Marquez was not only bringing the subject of the drug militias out in
the open, he was hinting at evidence that military intelligence knew about
the assassination attempt before it took place. Never before had any military
officer acknowledged that corrupt military officials had joined with the drug
dealers and corrupt landowners in a right-wing plot to seize control of the
nation, Relations between Maza Marquez and the military began to deteriorate
immediately. Here was an attack on a high-ranking official, yet the army did
not respond. They did not seize suspects; they did not set up the usual
roadblocks in an attempt to stop the flight of the attackers. They made no
statement to express their concern or to deplore the attack on Maza Marquez.
They did nothing. The minister of defense, in fact, issued a statement
denying Maza Marquez's charge of military involvement in the drug militias
and in the assassination attempt.

Captain Huanumen was arrested, however, and was found guilty, along with two
police officers. And Maza Marquez accelerated his campaign to hunt down
corrupt police officers. Every police commander in northern Colombia was
fired, and the chief of police, General Delgado Mallarino, was quietly
retired.

But the effort to clean up corruption in the military quickly stalled. Only
at the end of President Barco's term of office was something done. Barco
dismissed five generals for their failure to pursue the war on the drug
traffickers.

They did look at some corruption charges, but they did nothing to investigate
how the assassination attempt was organized. It was quite unpleasant. One
cartoonist drew a picture of me as a common gossip. The truth is that after
the attack, I felt very bad. I had never felt so totally alone in my
professional life. I saw everybody making excuses, and 1, just having been
the target of an attack that had left a number of people dead, where I saw
firsthand the degree of danger that I was facing, saw that the organs of
state had been penetrated by the Medellin cartel itself-, I saw myself face
to face with the Mexican; I felt like a David standing alone in front of
Goliath.

But I came to the conclusion that I had to keep fighting. Very possibly, I
told myself, I would never get out of it alive. Why should I have believed
that I would be an exception? No one who had taken on the Mexican and Pablo
Escobar had lived to tell the tale. They were murdered. Since Lara Bonilla
they had started to pick off their enemies one by one ... and looking at
these recent events, all this elaborate infrastructure they had, I saw that
they could even kill me in the bathroom. I began to mistrust everyone.
Nevertheless, I decided to forge ahead. What was the motive? I saw that
President Barco was quite strong in his resolve.

So I went back to work. A few days after the attack on me, in June 1989, the
governor of Antioquia province was assassinated. The violence gripping the
country following the attack on me was terrorism directed at the government
itself. Our investigations concluded that the killing was carried out with
the same modus operandi as in the attack against me-with a remote-control
bomb device—evidence once again that these assassins had learned new
techniques in carrying out terrorism.

On December 10, 1989, a bomb containing more than two tons of dynamite
exploded at 7:30 A.M. in front of Maza Marquez's headquarters. The explosion
was so massive that it was heard from one end of Bogota to the other.

I had just entered my office. Usually at that time of the morning, I go out
again to sit with some of the staff to have a cup of coffee and read the
papers. For some reason, I didn't do it that morning. I went right into the
office, which was the only place in the building designed to withstand a bomb
blast. And for some reason, I had an important phone call to make, so I got
up and closed the door, something I also seldom do. As I was dialing, I felt
a massive blast that threw me to the floor. I got up as best I could and
opened the door. The first thing I saw was my secretary lying on the floor,
right where I usually had my cup of coffee. A wall had fallen on top of her,
and she died instantly. I was anguished and could feel a pain in my back. I
began to run anxiously about the building to see what was left. I felt
infinite pain; I had never seen anything like this. The building was
destroyed, and as I went along all I could see were lifeless bodies and the
wounded. The majority were women, members of the administrative staff. The
sorrow began to give way to deep anger.

That day I swore to myself that I would get them. I hated them, and I have
been unable to overcome that hatred. Talk about drug trafficking, and my hair
stands on end. It was Escobar and the Mexican who were responsible for that
attack. We have a tape intercept on which Pinina, the chief of Escobar's
assassins, is insulting another person for not having put enough power into
the bomb. Eighty people died in that attack; more than 120 people were
wounded.

In March 1990, a truck with more than one thousand pounds of dynamite was
found near Maza Marquez's apartment in fashionable northern Bogota. It was
deactivated moments before it was set to go off. "That's the luck I'm talking
about," he told me later, in one of the many meetings we had in the midst of
all the bombings and attacks and threats. "I tell you, it all has to do with
the Holy Spirit-Divine luck."

Throughout 1988 and 1989, Israeli, British, and Spanish mercenaries trained
death squads in terrorist techniques never before seen in Colombia. With
their help, the private militias of the drug dealers learned how to make
incendiary devices, the latest technology in bomb production, the use of
plastic explosives and TNT. They became familiar with the use of
remote-control triggers and how to place altimeter-activated detonators to
blow up airplanes. They learned how to make explosives from everyday
materials, from potassium chloride and light bulbs and white sugar, from
trigger devices bought in Israel, and from matches. They learned to make
gunpowder and Molotov cocktails and to set up defensive perimeters with
explosives. Some of the training dealt with evading the detection of
explosives in airport X-ray machines and how to conceal electric circuits.

In 1989 and 1990, 25,000 Colombians died in the escalating violence that
attacked every segment of society.

In mid-1988, Interpol and the British Embassy had advised DAS of the presence
of British mercenaries contracted by the Cali cartel in the capital of Valle
state. The full story broke on August 16 when the Sunday Times of London
published a detailed report on the activities of the mercenaries. The
British, like the Israelis, were schooled in special forces operations. They
made two trips to Colombia. Their first trip was in August 1988 and
contracted by Medellin. But their second mission in June 1989 was vastly
different: They were hired to kill some of the men who paid for their first
trip. At the top of their list was Pablo Escobar.

The British adventure in Colombia began when two Colombian army intelligence
officers contacted Peter Tompkins, a wellknown mercenary who had been working
in Angola. They offered him work in Colombia to conduct courses for
"paramilitary groups who were fighting leftist guerrillas with the aim of
attacking the FARC headquarters at Uribe." Each mercenary was to receive
$5,000 a month. One of the Colombians, a colonel, said that military
intelligence was working with Rodriguez Gacha toward that end. According to
Tompkins, Rodriguez Gacha wanted to stop all guerrilla activities because the
guerrillas were competing with him for control of cocaine exports. Rodriguez
Gacha was to pay all expenses, and military intelligence would take care of
their entry into Colombia, providing them with arms on arrival and avoiding
problems with immigration at the airport. Unlike the general training
assignment of the Israelis, the British would have specific tasks: to seize
and destroy Casa Verde, the headquarters of FARC; to kill FARC's leaders; to
block all access to the mountain hideout, and to stop the supply routes to
the zone.

But the British were not able to carry out that plan. The arms never arrived,
and they had a hard time adapting to jungle conditions. Worst of all, the
antidrug raids that were becoming more frequent at the time forced the
militias to keep breaking camp and to relocate to safer territory. The
British settled for providing a training course and left Colombia toward the
end of August 1988. They returned, however, in May 1989, but this time they
were contracted by the rival Cali cartel with a single, hazardous assignment:
to kill Pablo Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha.

Relations between Cali and Medellin had been deteriorating since March 1988
when Cali operatives set off a bomb at a MedelIin building controlled by
Pablo Escobar. Medellin held Cali responsible for that attack and charged the
Cali cartel members with providing information that led to the capture and
short imprisonment of Jorge Luis Ochoa in 1987. Many drug investigators
attributed the rift to a fight for market control in the United States,
especially over the high-price New York and Washington markets, where Cali
holds a monopoly in cocaine sales. But that was not the only reason. The Cali
drug bosses were much more involved in legitimate business interests. It was
one thing to fight among themselves, but attacking government and civilian
targets was something else. They rejected the violent actions taken by
Medellin, using words that could have come right out of a movie: "It's bad
for business."

A friend from Cali gave me a telling example of the difference between the
two cartels. A man he knew had participated in a drug shipment and had the
bad luck to be captured by the antinarcotics police. In jail, this man
decided to threaten the judge who indicted him. When Gilberto Rodriguez
Orejuela, the head of the Cali cartel, found out about that threat, he sent a
message through an intermediary: "We don't kill judges or ministers. We buy
them."

In the many tape intercepts obtained by the government, the infighting was
evident. Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha often tried to seek a broad underworld
consensus for their destabilization strategy but to no avail. Unlike the
Medellin drug organization that launched a frontal assault on politics-with
Escobar reaching Congress as an alternate delegate and Carlos Lehder creating
his own party-Cali preferred behind-the-scenes, back-channel dealing. What it
needed it could obtain through business contacts, not through bombings and
political campaigns. Rodriguez Orejuela never bothered to seek elective
office or to form a political party. When blood spilled at the hands of the
Cali cartel, it was a result of internecine battles for primacy in the
business. Never did the violence reach out to the citizenry, never did it
alienate the political establishment. The Cali cartel was not interested in
buying up large tracts of land, joining with rightist forces to fight the
guerrillas, or winning popular support among the peasantry by creating social
welfare programs in the slums. Rather, it set about making money and doing so
in the legitimate business world. While Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha were
shunned by the MedelIin power brokers, their Cali counterparts owned banks,
security agencies, and sugar refineries, and were shareholders in the local
racetrack-the major traditional enterprises in the region where they lived.
Rodriguez Orejuela took pains to develop and maintain good relations with the
nation's power brokers and counted among his friends key politicians and
industrialists.

Moreover, Rodriguez Orejuela had worked hard to earn his nickname, The Chess
Master. He had obtained the drug-trafficking indictment filed against him in
the United States and offered himself up for trial in Colombia. He
subsequently was acquitted of those charges and so lived in Colombia as a
perfectly legal member of society.

He once called the newsroom at El Espectador to remind us cordially of his
status in the world. The occasion for his call was the publication of a story
describing a police raid on his daughter's house. Nothing had been found in
the raid, and the young woman was not charged with a crime. "By the way, this
violence is really terrible," he said. "You and I are both victims of Pablo
Escobar. The violence he is causing is terrible, and I understand what you're
going through because I'm in the same situation."

The Cali drug bosses had reason to be put off by the high profile adopted by
the Medellin cocaine dealers; not only was it bad for business, it was
diametrically opposed to their attempts to blend into a smooth-functioning
economic system.

Cali had been spared the violence that characterized other major Colombian
cities. The calm was shattered, however, with the onset of the war between
the cartels. Bombs shattered radio stations, drugstores, and other buildings
owned by Rodriguez Orejuela and his associates. As if in retribution,
important members of Medellin's assassin squads were being gunned down in the
street. Every intelligence agency in the country had been alerted to the
presence of the British mercenaries in Cali-their rude attraction to local
night life and women made them easy to spot. Despite their high profile, the
British decided to carry out their attack on Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha. On
June 4 they launched a commando raid on a ranch owned by Escobar near
Medellinthey had received information that he would be there. They flew

from Cali in two helicopters, painted with the markings of the national
police. One of the helicopters was actually piloted by a police captain,
Gustavo Gonzales Sandoval; overladen and flying through bad weather, it
crashed several miles short of the target, killing the pilot. Peasants
crowded to the site to find four battered men, who spoke no Spanish. Rather
than accept the peasants' help, the men tried to flee on foot. They were
rescued by their mates from the other helicopter. These mates had gotten lost
and had landed three hours by land from the site of the accident. They paid a
guide 100,000 pesos-about $2,000, an enormous sum for such a thing in
Colombia—to hike through the mountains with them to the crash site. Then they
radioed back to the other helicopter, gathered up the wounded and all the
arms that were on board, and fled.

pps. 115-139
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End

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